Preview in English by OWEN GLEIBERMAN (www.variety.com) - Dal 4 Gennaio
(Assassin's Creed; USA/REGNO UNITO/FRANCIA 2016; Fantasy d'azione; 115'; Produz.: Regency Enterprises/DMC Film/The Kennedy/Marshall Company/Latina Pictures in associaz. con Ubisoft Motion Pictures; Distribuz.: 20th Century Fox Italia)
Carlos Bardem (Benedicto) Michelle H. Lin (Lin) Brian Gleeson (Il giovane Joseph) Rufus Wright (Alex) Cali Nelle (Assassino)
Musica: Jed Kurzel
Costumi: Sammy Sheldon
Scenografia: Andy Nicholson
Fotografia: Adam Arkapaw
Montaggio: Christopher Tellefsen
Effetti Speciali: Andy Williams (supervisore effetti speciali)
Makeup: Chantal Busuttil e Karen Schembri Grima
Casting: Jina Jay
Scheda film aggiornata al:
26 Gennaio 2017
Sinossi:
In breve:
Grazie ad una tecnologia rivoluzionaria in grado di sbloccare i ricordi genetici, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) sperimenta le avventure di Aguilar, suo antenato della Spagna del XV secolo, scoprendo cosĂŹ di discendere da una misteriosa societĂ segreta, gli Assassini. Accumulando conoscenze ed incredibili abilitĂ , Callum sarĂ in grado di sfidare una potente e crudele organizzazione Templare dei giorni nostri.
In altre parole:
Segnato da una tragedia in tenera etĂ , Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender) Ăš un galeotto in attesa dellâesecuzione, quando gli capita unâinattesa seconda possibilitĂ grazie ai misteriosi uffici delle Abstergo Industries. Attraverso una tecnologia rivoluzionaria possono sbloccare le memorie genetiche contenute nel suo DNA; cosĂŹ Cal viene inviato indietro nel tempo, nella Spagna del XV secolo. LĂŹ rivivrĂ le esperienze del suo antenato, Aguilar de Nerha, un membro di una societĂ segreta nota come gli Assassini, che combattono per proteggere il libero arbitrio dalla sete di potere dellâOrdine dei Templari. Trasformato dal suo stesso passato, Cal comincia ad acquisire le conoscenze e le abilitĂ fisiche necessarie per rovesciare lâopprimente organizzazione dei Templari ai giorni nostri.
Synopsis:
When Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) explores the memories of his ancestor Aguilar and gains the skills of a Master Assassin, he discovers he is a descendant of the secret Assassins society.
Through a revolutionary technology that unlocks his genetic memories, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) experiences the adventures of his ancestor, Aguilar, in 15th Century Spain. Callum discovers he is descended from a mysterious secret society, the Assassins, and amasses incredible knowledge and skills to take on the oppressive and powerful Templar organization in the present day
Commento critico (a cura di OWEN GLEIBERMAN, www.variety.com)
How is this video-game movie different from all other video-game movies? It's got classier stars, but it's really the same old sludge.
It used to be that when a highly touted actor â a prestigious actor, a thespian â agreed to star in a piece of schlock, he might be grateful for the work, but the job was still undertaken with a pinch of shame. When Laurence Olivier played a leering rapacious soap-opera gloss on Henry Ford in Harold Robbinsâ âThe Betsyâ (1978), or when Michael Caine gallivanted around the globe to star in paycheck movies from âBlame It On Rioâ to âJaws: The Revenge,â no one was fooling anybody.
How times have changed. âAssassinâs Creed,â in which Michael Fassbender plays some sort of leaping, fighting, time-tripping â but still moody and sullen â bare-chested historic warrior dude, is a mediocre video-game movie that has branded itself in a most
revealing way. The film is coming off 20 years of soullessly trashy and forgettable video-game spinoffs (the âMortal Kombatâ and âStreetfighterâ films, âMax Payneâ and âBloodRayne,â the âLara Croftâ series, this yearâs âWarcraftâ). But âAssassinâs Creedâ isnât fighting the junkiness of that pedigree â itâs using it to prop up its own pretensions. The hook the producers are selling is, âHere, at long last, is a video-game movie thatâs a cut above the others.â
Shot in somber sci-fi Renaissance tones, âAssassinâs Creedâ has a âMasterpiece Theatreâ cast thatâs ten times classier than it needs, it cost more than $150 million to make, and itâs deeply self-serious about its long-ago-and-far-away setting: 15th-century Spain during the Inquisition, which means a lot of solemn religious dogma and burning at the stake. Fassbender takes on the role of Callum Lynch, a modern-day criminal saved from execution and forced to enter the memories of an Inquisition-era
Assassin, as if he were playing Neo from âThe Matrixâ crossed with Hamlet. His every tragic gaze and saturnine grimace tells the audience that this isnât just some glorified dystopian joystick ride â itâs real drama! Except that it isnât. In âAssassinâs Creed,â Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge.
Callum has been saved from death by Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), a mysterious CEO so lost in time that he still wears a black turtleneck, and his daughter, Sophia (Marion Cotillard), who is the lead scientist at Rikkinâs company, Abstergo Industries. Itâs Sophia who oversees an experiment thatâs the filmâs mystical knockoff of virtual reality: Callum gets strapped into an airborne harness that looks like a dental X-ray machine from hell, with a monitor implanted in the back of his neck, and the apparatus
zaps him back through time to channel the memories of Aguilar de Nerha, the Assassin who is his ancestor. Callumâs mission is to find the hidden location of the Apple of Eden (âThe seed of mankindâs first disobedienceâ), which is somehow connected to the words of Christopher Columbus.
Itâs not clear why any of this is happening, but to say that âAssassinâs Creedâ doesnât make a lot of sense would be both accurate and beside the point. The filmâs plot is a shambles, yet everything in it links back, with loopy exactitude, to the past â like the suspicion that Callumâs father, Joseph (Brendan Gleeson), killed his mother, though at the behest of forces greater than himself. Or the fact that Abstergo Industries is a front for the Knights Templar, the order of Christian fighters who first emerged during the Crusades. Are we supposed to read some sort of higher statement
into the fact that theyâre the movieâs bad guys?
I wonât attempt to parse the fetishistic levels of âmeaningâ woven into the âAssassinâs Creedâ video games, but in the movie the material is derivative in the extreme. Basically, weâre watching âThe Matrixâ and âThe Da Vinci Codeâ get Cuisinarted into weaponized action sequences that look like they came off of old heavy-metal album covers. Thereâs an aura of cult doom hanging over the action, but that just makes everything on-screen feel glumly ritualized and abstracted. The Knights Templar, man! How sinister-theological-cool. Itâs all a way of creating âmysteryâ where there is none.
A movie like âAssassinâs Creedâ doesnât just revolve around dueling cults (the Knights Templar v. the Assassins). The film is all about the cultish complexity of its cosmology; it treats its audience of video-game connoisseurs as a ready-made cult of fans eager to obsess over the filmâs visual expansion of
the gamesâ design. Itâs seriously doubtful that the movie will find enough of those fans in the U.S. to qualify as a domestic success. Yet that may not matter: In the suspended vagueness of its drama, âAssassinâs Creedâ speaks the kinetic aesthetic language of the global market. As directed by Justin Kurzel, the film looks like a period painting recreated through pixels of murk; it suggests a Tony Scott movie lit by Vermeer. And it includes one spectacular money-shot image: men diving off of tall buildings, like superheroes with a touch of suicidal grandeur.
Yet the visual effects are scattered and arbitrary, and the actors are mostly reduced to props. Cotillard, punked-out in a rather Teutonic way (she looks like something out of âMetropolisâ), makes her presence felt, and Irons delivers a couple of droll lines that provide the film with its only dabs of humor. But Fassbender, despite his traumatic
exertions, begins to disappear inside the tightly composed frames. The movie, in its grab-bag philosophical way, makes a big deal out of the purported last words of the 11th-century Persian missionary Hassan-i Sabbah (which were then popularized by William S. Burroughs): âNothing is true, everything is permitted.â In âAssassinâs Creed,â anything goes, nothing takes hold.
FEATURETTE - La scena dell'ANIMUS:
Bibliografia:
Nota: Si ringraziano 20th Century Fox e Nicola Fiorentino (Ufficio Stampa 20Th Century Fox)